Order vs. Chaos on the Streets of Cairo

Regular Egyptians will soon face a choice: help Mubarak or help the demonstrators?

CAIRO, Egypt -- When I arrived at Cairo's international airport on Tuesday afternoon, I
had to break curfew to get downtown. Curfew was three in the afternoon,
which at this time of year is exactly when the afternoon sun starts
hitting the dusty buildings at an angle that makes them glow instead
merely look grimy.

My driver, who offered me hashish and Doritos (in that order) yelled "foreigner!" at the army's first checkpoint, and
the soldiers let us pass. For the next two minutes, we sped along at an
extraordinary pace: No cars were on the road, and if we continued
unobstructed it seemed like we might get downtown, and within an easy
walk of the protests, in just ten minutes or so--a speed I would have
thought impossible in Cairo without chartering a helicopter. Instead, an
army checkpoint stopped and redirected us through a labyrinth of
backstreets, with each city-block applying a form of impromptu traffic
direction that reminded me of Baghdad in 2004. Neighborhood men of all
ages had constructed roadblocks, and they interrogated every driver.

The
first man I saw carried the type of samurai sword known as a "wakizashi,"
and his four friends had long metal bars, like bo staffs, which they
banged on the road to make us aware of their presence, in case four men
with medieval weaponry were not attention-grabbing enough on their own.
They talked to me, asked if I was Egyptian, and let me go without any
difficulty at all. This scene repeated itself roughly three dozen more
times between Heliopolis and downtown, and the traffic wardens
apologized to me nearly every time for the inconvenience. Near Al Azhar
University, a man with a huge gleaming meat cleaver--probably recently purchased from the kitchenware section of Khan al Khalili market--smiled and said, "Welcome to Egypt."

I do not recall ever being
so pleased to be surrounded by blade-wielding Arab vigilantes. The
smile, I thought, was telling. Many people have told me that they are
angry at having to stay up all night with weapons, just to keep basic peace
in their neighborhoods after the flight of the police Friday. But the
smile of Mr. Cleaver told a different story. He seemed to enjoy being responsible for his area's safety, and pleased to be allowed to
dispense justice there more responsibly than anyone in uniform had for
quite some time. He was the place where the buck stopped and, if the
buck wasn't careful, got ruthlessly chopped into many smaller bucks. His
might not have been the role he wanted every day, but it evidently
pleased him in the moment.

These encounters happened mostly on
Cairo's backstreets. If Tahrir Square is Cairo's heart, those
backstreets are the capillaries snaking through Heliopolis, Nasr City,
Islamic Cairo, and other areas where a huge portion of Cairo's middle
class resides. I bring up Mr. Cleaver now because he could, if the
clashes in Tahrir drag on, be decisive. Right now he is in his
neighborhood, and the newfound mastery of his (hyperlocal) destiny is
strangely refreshing. At some point, though, he and his ilk will start
making a decision. Will they choose more order or more chaos? More
order means more Mubarak, in a devil's bargain with the middle class
whereby he restores order by arresting the protesters, putting cops back
on the street, and, with the collusion of neighborhood vigilantes,
turns Egypt into not just a police state but a pariah state as well.
More chaos means more demonstrations and a scary, unpredictable
future that could make his role as author of his own
destiny permanent. Right now I can't tell whether the Mr. Cleavers of
Cairo are rushing to help the pro- or anti-Mubarak side--or are content to sit back and wait.

Photo by Marco Longari/AFP/Getty

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